When I first played Ankh, I was fully sold. Gorgeous production, genuinely stunning minis, that specific table presence where someone walking through the staff lounge stops to ask what we’re playing before they’ve even seen a single card revealed. I told at least three people over the following month that it was one of the best area control games I owned, unprompted, the kind of recommendation you make when you’re still riding the high of a single great first session rather than actually reflecting on the design underneath it.

Then it sat on the shelf for a while. Not a deliberate break, just the natural churn of a group with a lot of games and one Thursday a week to play them. When it finally came back around, I noticed something I hadn’t the first time: I wasn’t excited to teach it. Not dreading it exactly, just neutral in a way that didn’t match how I’d been talking about it to other people.

We played it anyway, and about halfway through the game I finally put my finger on what had been nagging me since the first session. The map genuinely doesn’t have the spatial tension I’d credited it with in my head. Everything sits at roughly the same distance from everything else, which I’d apparently smoothed over the first time because the production was carrying so much of my attention. And the endgame, the way the table reliably piles onto whoever’s ahead, which I’d read as “tense” the first time, was actually just kingmaking with better lighting.

I went back and quietly told the same three people I’d raved to that I’d walked the recommendation back a little, which is an uncomfortable thing to do, more uncomfortable than just staying quiet about it would have been. Denise laughed at me for it, not unkindly, said something about how the minis had clearly done my thinking for me the first time around, which is fair and also slightly annoying to hear said out loud.

I still keep Ankh on the shelf. I’ve just adjusted what I say about it, and stopped reaching for it first when someone asks for an area control recommendation. There’s a version of this essay where I pretend I caught the flaw immediately and am just now getting around to writing about it, and I’d rather be honest that it took a full second play and a fair amount of self-correction to actually see the game instead of the table presence it arrived with.

It’s made me a little more careful generally about the gap between a first reaction and an actual opinion, not just with games. A first play, a first read, a first anything, is mostly your nervous system responding to novelty, and novelty is not the same thing as quality even when it feels identical in the moment. I still trust my instincts. I’ve just learned to wait a second session before I say anything out loud that I might have to walk back later.